Dan & Edgar posted a good video (Warning: not for little ones) that shows the challenges of living coherently with one’s worldview when that involves denying universal morality.

One of the commenters caught my attention on a couple items:

This is just another deliberate misinterpretation of the Selfish Gene theory. It’s not about the genes of the individual, it’s about the genes of the species. It’s the reason there are worker ants and bees that do nothing but work, fight and die. They allow for their SPECIES to survive, not their individual genes.

I’d suggest that it’s not the Darwinists that have closed minds, so much as the Creationists that have closed eyes and ears. If only they’d take after the third monkey and close their mouths too.

My reply: Then why are humans — the most advanced species — so “irrational” when it comes to morality? Wouldn’t we be all in lockstep if it was all about the genes of the species? I don’t see lions debating the morality of killing gazelles.

And as another commenter noted, wouldn’t anything I do in a materialistic worldview be driven by my genes?

Then the original commenter went a different direction:

Can you point out which part of the Bible even mentions Genes? DNA? Germ Theory? Bacteria? Anything that couldn’t have been written by some wandering nomad in the desert???

Here’s my response: Cute red herring. If the Bible claimed to be a science textbook then that might be a remotely relevant point.

What I find highly informative about the Big Book O’ Atheist Sound Bites crowd is that they never bring up passages like Genesis 22:17: I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.

The ancients thought there were just over 1,000 stars. But they obviously knew there were a vast, vast amount of grains of sand. So why don’t they highlight verses like this and be skeptical of their skepticism, even if just for one time? We know there are billions of grains of sand and billions of stars. Of course the Bible wasn’t claiming the figures were precisely the same.

But why don’t “skeptics” say, “Wow, how could the author of Genesis know that there were billions of stars? That obviously wasn’t written by some uneducated wandering nomad. Maybe I should take the spiritual claims of the bible more seriously since it is accurate on something like that, and is so well supported by archeology and history.”

P.S. The Bible supports the “selfish gene theory.”  It is called original sin.  It also tells you about the cure to this eternally deadly disease.